I want to continue to develop some of the ideas I was exploring in the recent piece I posted about styles of thinking. I think there's probably too much going on in diagram I used to begin the piece–and too much remains unexplained. So in the next several posts I'm going to break it down into its component parts. The most important element is the movement depicted here:
I think that there are all kinds of cultural cycles–small ones like the 80-year New Deal Social Democracy cycle in the U.S. [FDR/originating, Truman-Kennedy/articulating, Johnson-Carter/formalizing, Reagan-Bush2/dissolving] or large ones like the the two thousand year cycle of the Christian West, which I described in the post referred to above. And others bigger and smaller than these. I'm just talking about something we are all familiar with from common experience, and I leave it to the reader to judge whether this kind of cycle that everywhere structures organic life can be legitimately analogized to the life cycle of a cultures and cultural movements.
It's not an original idea, but it's not commonly considered acceptable, and one explanation is given by the figure itself–It's a style of thinking that is out of season. It's an attempt to formalize or synthesize,which is a summer activity, and we are in the dead of winter both culturally and politically. And I'm convinced that developments in the political will continue to devolve no matter who's in office until something shifts in the cultural sphere.
But even if the reader is unwilling to accept the analogy, it should be clear that we're in a cultural situation now in which the old forms have pretty much dissolved. That doesn't mean that they don't still exist or that for some groups or individuals that these old forms don't have residual vitality and power, but whatever life they may have for individuals, they no longer have broad cultural legitimacy. I'd argue this is true as well for science. It's soul withering job done, it's out of season as well. It still has legitimacy among liberal, cosmopolitan types, but they have devolved into a politically impotent faction with little influence on policy, especially when it comes to environmental science. Science has become just one perspective among many in a multi-perspectival pluralistic, polytheistic world.
We have a fragmented, pluralized culture in which no faction, cultural form, or mindset plays a truly dominant role. While clearly some factions are more influential than others in terms of their shaping the contemporary cultural landscape, they do so more out of old habit (Enlightenment rationality) or fear-driven fanaticism (tea-party right) more than anything that is truly robust and healthful.
And insofar as we, in America anyway, have a shared cultural life it's a kind of weird amalgam of leveled, last-man, market consumerism on the one hand, and a celebration of uebermenschen on the other. The Nietzscheanism pervades our films and fiction, from arthouse-genre pieces like Breathless to action-hero genre pieces like the James Bond films and its copycats, to the late work of Woody Allen, and more recently films like Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, No Country for Old Men. I don't know about you, but I find this kind of thing, even if technically interesting, predictably tedious and spent, and as having gone through its own cycle of burgeoning and decay. I found the latest Batman movie, Dark Knight, unwatchably tedious. In my opinion it was a sign that this nihilistic genre has jumped the shark. Probably wishful thinking on my part.
At this point in the cycle nothing points to the future unless it has the energy of something fresh or new. That's my argument in support of All Things Shining–it has that in a way that I found shockingly refreshing coming from the usually bleak academic precincts from which it was issued. And it's not surprising to me that it's getting the kind of criticism from the dissolving types who are temperamentally incapable of recognizing anything that has a breath of fresh air about it. But it's not the only thing going on. And I'm totlally on board with John Ebert's views that visionary filmmakers like Tarkovski, Herzog, Kubrick and some of the sci-fi genre filmmakers typified by Spielberg, Lucas,TV's Lost and Fringe have something truly fresh–something that is looking forward rather than in the rear-view window. These people are on to something.
But none of what they are on to is 'it'. They are only premonitions of whatever 'it' might be, and that 'it' will be a new cultural impulse that will play the role for the next cycle that the Buddha played in Asian societies at the beginning of the axial age, as Socrates did for Hellenic society, the great prophets did for Israel, as Pico, Luther, Galileo, Descartes did to promote the Renaissance/Reformation/Scientific Revolution that brought us into the modern age.
I believe that modernity's role, for all its technological advances, will be seen in retrospect primarily as dissolving the old Christian medieval synthesis to clear a space for something spiritually new. As a believing, practicing Christian I have my own interpretation of why this needed to happen, and I embrace the great dissolving of Christendom as a step forward rather than look at it as a disaster. But I am also intensely aware of the risks, because I don't believe that this earth project will automatically have the best possible outcome. The earth and its evolution is a human project and humans are responsible for any eventual outcome, whether they actively choose it or let whatever happens happen by default.
It would appear that we're headed for the default option, which is ecological disaster or some kind of barbaric, mechanomorphic transformation of the human in some form or another of 'singularity'. It seems obvious to me that this is the current historical trajectory unless there is some dramatic change of direction. And the only way I see that happening is if there is some new 'axial' impulse that arises as a counterbalance to the coming inevitable transhuman barbarism. This discontinuity is the 'it' to which I referred above.
I don't know what 'it' will look like or how it will come to be, but human history has produced these 'its' before, and I see no reason why it won't or cannot do it again. When that happens, we will have our originating Q1 moment for the next cultural cycle, and it will play out over time much as the last cycle did. That's my main reason for believing we're at the beginning of a new cycle because something has got to give. Either the new cycle starts as a step forward, or it starts in a new Dark Age.
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